Scottish Government temporary worker spend: FOI release

Information requested

How much money has the Scottish Government spent on temporary workers in the last five years, with a breakdown of how many staff were employed and what departments?

Response

I enclose a copy of some of the information you asked for but advise that these are separate data sets for cost data and workforce numbers and necessitate being considered as such.

Your enquiry focused on ‘temporary workers’. Our response has therefore focused on sharing data on ‘contingent workers’ (those who are not directly employed by the Scottish Government) and additionally, temporary workers who are directly employed by the Scottish Government (for instance, those employed on Fixed Term Contracts).

The two data sets relating to ‘contingent workers’ have been extracted from different systems and therefore can not be viewed as inter-related, due to dependency on different hierarchical structures and definitions of contingent worker. This data does not provide a comparable view of the costs attributable to the contingent workforce listed.

In relation to your request to provide the data set broken down by department, we are providing this by ‘DG Family’, which reflects the Scottish Government departmental hierarchy.

The Scottish Government implemented an Oracle Cloud enterprise resource planning system in Autumn 2024, replacing our legacy HR and Finance systems. Though the data capture of temporary workers remains an area requiring some further development, the implementation of a combined HR and Finance system will improve the data we hold on workforce costs.

Additional Notes re Workforce Data

For the purposes of published data, the definition of contingent workers includes consultants, contractors, interim managers, inward secondments/ SLAs, temporary workers, short-term youth initiatives and a category ‘other’.

The extracts provide a quarterly snapshot of contingent worker numbers due to the variance of these numbers in any given period and the short term nature of some of the work undertaken.

The data we have supplied in relation to contingent workers and temporary workers is taken from the Scottish Government Quarterly Statistics Publication . (https://www.gov.scot/collections/scottishgovernment-workforce-statistics/)

Please see attached data sets accompanying this response.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202500447285 - Information released - Annex

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